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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    KMail and pgp signing: walking in small circles
From:       Sven Radej <sven () lisa ! exp ! univie ! ac ! at>
Date:       1999-07-30 12:38:50
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As I said it is fixed and works fine. But.

Method 1)
The current "fixed" way works fine and robust except when somone has
non-us-ascii characters in the message: a single umlaut would cause pgp to
detect that message is "binary", and pgp will encode it making it unreadable
without PGP - that is no clear text signing.

My next idea was to force non-us-ascii people (pih, neglectable minority: only
all german speaking, scandinavian  and central european people, let alone other
more exotic) to use Quoted-Printable. In this case KMail would encode messge to
quoted-printable before signing. Doesn't work - MTAs (recent sendmails) will
turn it into 8bit and therefore corrupt it. Is there a way to notfy MTA by some
header not to do this? And besides is that the right way to do this? Isn't
quoted-printable passe? Do other mailers check PGP and then decode from
quoted-printable (KMail doesn't but this could ne aranged)? I am sceptic about
this.

Method 2)
The old way (making detached signature and glue it together) fails if there is
trailing spaces in some line. In pgp5.01 option "clearsig" (in that case
pgp should ignore trailing whitespace in computing the signature) simply doesn't
work.

My last idea now is to strip all trailing white space from message before
signing it. 

And by the way: did you know that if you sign/encrypt your message, attachments
are not signed/encrypted? I didn't! Should they or not?

My problem is: there is no mail application I could compare KMail to (I am
going to check Empath sources now). All others Pine, Mutt XFmail either do the
method 1 or use some obscure filters (whic do not work in Pine 4.1). I did
browse the Web, Usenet, even mailed to one PGP guy (but, before reading the
license: no support for freeware) I didn't find anything usefull.

:-(
-- 
Sven Radej      radej@kde.org
KDE developer   Visit http://www.kde.org

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